VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

Emmanuel Isikaku, the president of the Film and Video Producers and Marketers Association ofNigeria (FVPMAN), has underlined, the framework has been formulated by people that do not havea direct experience of the video industry’s environment and it is too heavily inspired by Westernmodels.Maybe what they are trying to introduce sounds as the best thing on paper, but in realityit may not be the most suitable solution. Because the society in which they are trying tomake the framework fit is different from those from where they copied it. Economics isnot natural science. Laws depend from contexts! So something that is successfulelsewhere can be a failure when applied to Nigeria. Because the societies are not thesame (Isikaku 2010).Censors Board’s attempt to regulate the video market progressively lost most of the videoindustry’s practitioners’ support. As a result the video economy became, if possible, morefragmented than it used to be and different production and distribution strategies emerged in orderto face the crisis.Out of the ashes of the video boom: New tendencies in the video industryThe tendencies that emerged from this situation can be schematized in two divergingorientations, similar to those that I have identified in the previous chapter when discussing the videopractitioners’ different positions in relation to the piracy debate. While this schematization isinevitably the result of an act of conceptual simplification, it is useful to understand the way theindustry is transforming. It is in fact within the field defined by these opposite poles thatNollywood’s future is going to be shaped.On the one hand, there is a section of the industry, part of which strongly resisted theenforcement of the framework, that still finds the informal structure of the video industryconvenient, because of the freedom and the economic mobility that it allows. For this section, thelocal market is still large enough to make the business worthwhile, and the quality of the productstends to be a secondary issue. The videos produced by this section are in fact oriented towardcircumscribed shares of the local audiences, which hardly have any other entertainment productdirectly targeted to them. The production system applied by this section of the video industry isbased on low budgets of production and high levels of productivity. Each video produced according71